Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Hold Your Horses: Characterization through Animals in Plutarch’s Artaxerxes, Part II

2014; Coimbra University Press; Volume: 11; Linguagem: Inglês

10.14195/0258-655x_11_1

2832-2118

Eran Almagor,

Language, Metaphor, and Cognition

This paper is the second part of three dealing with the subject of characterization through animals in Plutarch’s Lives. It argues that beasts have important narratological significance in the biographies, namely, to shed light on the character of the hero through their association with the realm of passions within the human soul. The text chosen to demonstrate this claim is Plutarch’s most neglected biography, the Life of the Persian king Artaxerxes. This part addresses the presence of horses in the biography and how they indirectly characterize the hero.